Full of worms and uncertainties, the guerrillas cross the forest. These famished shadows have been walking in the dark for many days beneath a roof of trees, shut off from the sun. For a clock, they use the voices of the thicket: The nightjar sings from the river announcing dawn; at dusk the parrots and macaws begin their scandalous chatter; when night falls the badgers scream and the coatis cough. On this occasion, for the first time in months, the guerrillas hear a cock crow. A village is close by.
In this village on this sierra, a landlord known as the Tiger of Ixcán is boss. Like the other masters of this land, he is exempted from the law and criminal responsibility. On his farms are gallows, whips, and pillories. When the local labor force is insufficient, the army sends him Indians by helicopter, to cut down trees or pick coffee for nothing.
Few have seen the Tiger of Ixcán. All fear him. He has killed many, has had many killed.
The guerrillas bring the Indians together and show them. The Tiger, dead, looks like an empty costume.
(336)
1974: Yoro
Rain
In Chile he has seen a lot of dying, his dearest friends shot, beaten, or kicked to death. Juan Bustos, one of President Allende’s advisers, has saved himself by a hair.
Exiled in Honduras, Juan drags out his days. Of those who died in Chile, how many died instead of him? From whom is he stealing the air he breathes? He has been this way for months, dragging himself from sorrow to sorrow, ashamed of surviving, when one evening his feet take him to a town called Yoro, in the central depths of Honduras.
He arrives in Yoro for no particular reason, and in Yoro spends the night under any old roof. He gets up very early and starts walking half-heartedly through the dirt streets, fearing melancholy, staring without seeing.
Suddenly, the rain hits him, so violent that Juan covers his head, though noticing right away that this prodigious rain isn’t water or hail. Crazy silver lights bounce off the ground and jump through the air.
“It’s raining fish!” cries Juan, slapping at the live fish that dive down from the clouds and leap and sparkle around him. Never again will it occur to him to curse the miracle of being alive, never again will he forget that he had the luck to be born in America.
“That’s right,” says a neighbor, quietly, as if it were nothing. “Here in Yoro it rains fish.”
1975: San Salvador
Miguel at Seventy
Each day of life is an unrepeatable chord of a music that laughs at death. With the dangerous Miguel still alive, El Salvador’s masters decide to hire an assassin to send his life and his music somewhere else.
The assassin has a dagger hidden beneath his shirt. Miguel sits talking to students at the university. He is telling them that young people must take the place of their jaded elders, that they must act, risk their necks, and do what must be done without cackling like hens each time they lay an egg. The assassin slowly slips through the audience until he’s right behind Miguel. But as he raises the blade, a woman screams and Miguel automatically flings himself to the ground, just avoiding the blow.
And thus occurs the twelfth birth of Miguel Mármol, at seventy years of age.
(222)
1975: San Salvador
Roque
Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol’s pupil in the art of resurrection, has twice escaped death up against the wall. Once he was saved because the government fell; the second time because the wall itself fell, thanks to an opportune earthquake. He also escaped from the torturers, who left him in bad shape but alive, and from the police, who chased him with blazing guns. He even escaped from stone-throwing soccer fans, from the fury of a woman scorned, and from numerous husbands thirsting for revenge.
Profound yet playful, the poet Roque preferred to laugh at himself than take life too seriously, and so saved himself from grandiloquence, solemnity, and other ailments so gravely afflicting Latin American political poetry.
Only from his comrades can he not save himself. It is they who condemn him, for the crime of Difference of Opinion. This bullet, the only one that could find Roque, had to come from right beside him.
(127)
1975: Amazon River
Tropical Landscape
The ship chugs slowly up the Amazon on this endless voyage from Belém to Manaos. Now and then, some shack masked by tangled lianas comes into view, and a naked child waves his hand at the crew. On the jammed deck someone reads the Bible aloud, sonorous praises to God, but most people prefer to laugh and sing as bottles and cigarettes pass from mouth to mouth. A tame cobra entwines itself on iron crossbeams, brushing against the skins of dead brothers drying in the air. The owner of the cobra, seated on the deck, challenges the other passengers to a game of cards.
A Swiss journalist traveling on this ship has for hours been watching a poor, bony old man embracing a large carton he never unclutches, even in his sleep. Stung by curiosity, the Swiss offers cigarettes, cookies, and conversation, but the old fellow is one without vices who isn’t hungry and has nothing to say.
In the middle of the voyage, in mid-jungle, the old man disembarks. The Swiss, helping him take the big carton ashore, peeks through the half-open lid and sees inside, wrapped in cellophane, a plastic palm tree.
(264)
1975: Amazon River
This Is the Father of All Rivers,
the mightiest river in the world, and the jungle sprouting from its breath is the last lung of this planet. The adventurous and the avaricious have flocked to Amazonia since the first Europeans who came this way discovered Indians with reversed feet, who walked backward instead of forward over these lands promising prodigious fortunes.
Since then, all business in Amazonia starts with a massacre. At an air-conditioned desk in São Paulo or New York, a corporate executive signs a check which amounts to an extermination order, for the initial job of clearing the jungle begins with Indians and other wild beasts.
They give the Indians sugar or salt mixed with rat poison, or bomb them from the air, or hang them by the feet to bleed to death without bothering to skin them, because who would buy the hides?
The job is finished off by Dow Chemical’s defoliants, which devastated Vietnam’s forests and now Brazil’s. Blind tortoises stumble about where trees used to be.
(55, 65, 67, and 375)
1975: Ribeirão Bonito
A Day of Justice
Large as countries are the lands of the cattle companies, conquerors of Amazonia. The Brazilian generals exempt them from taxes, open up roads for them, give them credits and permission to kill.
The companies use tattered campesinos from the northeast transplanted here by rivers and poverty. The campesinos kill Indians, and are killed in turn; they steal the Indians’ lands, and are stolen from in turn. They drive off the Indians’ cattle, whose flesh they will never taste.
When the highway reaches the village of Ribeirão Bonito, the police begin the expulsion. Campesinos who resist are persuaded in jail. Pulverizing them with clubs or sticking needles under their fingernails prove useful techniques. The priest João Bosco Burnier arrives in the village, enters the jail, asks for the torturers. A cop replies by blowing his head off with a bullet.